Tuesday, 7 August 2012

Using tools.

On Friday, history teacher and SecMAC graduate Caroline Speer talked about how it's a good thing that rote knowledge -- that is, memorizing information -- is gone, replaced by whipping out a phone and Googling your query. It breaks my heart that an educator, especially a humanities teacher, is not merely not fighting this change, but encouraging it.

I suppose I'm old-fashioned, as you all know, when it comes to this subject. But honestly, moments like this make me question whether or not I should be a teacher. I love teaching; I love my subject; I truly want to propagate an understanding of and passion for literature and literacy. I believe in its power to change lives. But I feel like the world doesn't want me to teach the way I was taught, the way I love teaching, the way I believe is right. I will never, ever be comfortable with e-readers and audiobooks replacing physical books. I don't want to teach students that it's okay not to remember information since they can always look it up later. As a teacher, I have a responsibility to prepare students for success in the world they'll enter; what if I don't like a lot about that world? I don't want to prepare them not to remember, or not to know how to write by hand (let alone not value handwriting and the feel of paper and the smell of ink), or not to love the scent of paper bound with glue and fabric-covered boards.

Technology is a wonderful tool, I grant you. However, it should not be the only tool we use, as is becoming the case. The modern world is enamored with its own creation, to the point of letting it replace what did not need replacing, and what might in fact damage the future of education by being lost: human interaction. That is what frightens me so about technology: its advancement has put us on the path to forgetting that, as George Williams (math teacher and SecMAC graduate) put it on Friday, "Education is about making human beings," not just for college and career preparation, and not just to boost a school's statistics about how much technology it uses.

When I was growing up, my father loved to use the term "well-rounded": he wanted us to grow up to be well-rounded people. Of course, he meant that I should like playing sports just as much as reading, which was not going to happen; not that I don't like being active, but--oh well, I'm getting off-topic. I do agree with him on this: we should teach our students to be well-rounded. Yes, by all means, teach them to use laptops and Tablets, teach them how to find articles online and the miracle that is JSTOR, but also teach them the joy of writing a letter by hand. Teach them how to search for books in a library and how to use the index of a source to find more books. Teach them how to hold a conversation, not just type one, so that they'll know how to talk without being able to delete the things about which they've changed their minds. Teach them how to use a calculator, but also teach them how to do some math in their heads or on paper, so if their calculator breaks or they left their phone at home, they can figure out the tip at a restaurant. Make sure they learn what happened in 1066, 1492, 1775, 1969, because having that knowledge deep inside them will mean that when reading a book or listening to a lecture or watching a movie set around that time, they will understand what it means because they know the context.

We're so much like the revolutions that have come before us. In the early eighteenth century, the world was discovering the microscope, and therefore the human body; it made them cling to reason and technology, too. That was the period of mind-body dualism. In the nineteenth century, the wake of the industrial revolution had made a world much more interested in steel and steam than the backs upon which it was built; it, too, forgot humanity in its rush for progress. I don't think it's much of a stretch to compare ourselves to them.